Dumb and Dumber

This week my Year 11s have continued writing their blogs. Their writing is basically stream of consciousness so they have horrific spelling and punctuation.

When I reminded one student (I'll name her Dumb) to go through and edit, Dumb said she already had. I asked, "what about making all the "i"s capitals?". She replied, "Why would I put capital letters in the middle of a sentence?" I didn't really know how to respond, I was dumbstruck... (bad pun). She really didn't understand that this was standard practise! When I was about to explain, another student (she can be known as Dumber) leaned over her shoulder and said "I never knew they were meant to be capitals, Miss." Both Dumb and Dumber were completely sincere. So I gave them a lesson they should have learnt by the time they were 10, not 17!

Dumb and Dumber regularly produce comments like this in my class, they frequently leave the rest of the class speechless with their stupid statements, and this is a class that never stops talking!

Last year, we went on a trip through the centre of Australia with 70 Year 10 students. For those that don't know, Australia is BIG and the landscape varied. We live in a city with a mediterranean climate, with four seasons that are generally mild. So travelling in a bus for days to reach endless plains of red desert is a brand new experience for our sheltered suburban kids (and me!).

Being on a bus with 35 students for hours at a time does tend to send the teachers a little insane, so we took it upon ourselves to make the most of their ignorance and gulibility. For example, we told the students that if they wanted to stop the dingoes coming near their tents, they needed to put a circle of shaving cream or flour around them every evening. Even though they told us they knew we were joking, when packing up the next morning there were at least three circles on the ground.

Another time, Dumber asked a teacher while walking through the outback, "Sir, will I see lions out here?".

When we crossed the border from South Australia to the Northern Territory, we informed students that they needed to set their watches back four hours. Dumb did. As their names imply, the NT is directly north of SA, and thus in the same time zone.

Crossing the border also means that visitors have to throw out any fruit they have, this is to stop fruit flies contaminating the landscape. However, the teachers managed to convince a whole bus of students that this also included any fruit flavoured lollies (candy). So the students handed over their sweet stashes and the teachers ended up with a boxful, which they proceeded to consume!

The strange thing is that Dumber is actually quite bright when it comes to school work. It's just that words from her brain bypass the filter system the rest of us have and exit straight out her mouth.

Blogging at School

This week I've been teaching blogging to my students and it's been surprising seeing which students have really taken to it. (We're using edublogs.org - its meant to be safer for the kiddies, but I have to say that blogger is much more intuitive!)

The task they have is to create a fictional blog to demonstrate how blogging can give a voice to someone who may otherwise not have that voice. It's a response to reading The Baghdad Blog by Salam Pax (a fascinating insight into an Iraqi perspective on the Iraq war, but much too complicated for my Year 11 students).

One of my students, who is less than motivated at the best of times and refuses to read ("I don't read, miss")has spent hours considering what he is going to write about. He's discovered that this is an opportunity to express what he's going through at the moment and perhaps work towards some solutions.

Other students are letting their imaginations go, planning to give perspectives on life from bulimics, addicts, gangsters (the Melbourne ganglands wars are a big topic at the moment, thanks to Underbelly), a person with multiple personality disorder, someone with autism (inspired by The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightime), even the life of a cannibal (entitled the skin's the best part). I'm actually looking forward to marking this work!

On the down side, when I explained to the class that they needed to "draw on" their understanding of The Baghdad Blog, one student, who always speaks the obvious without thinking, said, "We have have to draw?" Her class mates just turned around to her and stared. I myself, had to cover my mouth with the handout I was reading from to hide my smile. It didn't work.